The other day, I was having some problems with Network Manager (I only ever have problems with it to be honest). It kept overwriting my /etc/resolv.conf — the file where you configure what nameservers your system will use. Even after I uninstalled Network Manger, on rebooot I would find my …

I recently learned of a new web publishing tool called mailp.in, which lets you publish stories to a custom url by sending email to a particular email address. Quite a nifty idea.The service is a model of minimalist, yet highly functional design. The simplest thing that could possibly work, you …

A super quick tip this. The other day I needded to find images bigger than a given width on the New Internationalist website. The quickest way I could think of to do this was to use find to locate all the files and combine that with ImageMagick’s identify command. And finally to pipe that t …

One of the ways to make yourelf more productive and to save unnecessary typing in the bash shell is to get familiar with navigating your history. There are a number of ways to navigate your bash history beyond simply using the up arrow to get at your last command. This is a quick reference to some o …

A quick bit of commandline-fu today. And a trick that I always spend ages having to search the web for. Its often the case that you want to find the exact serial number or model or chipset of your motherboard. There is a wonderful command called dmidecode which fetches the DMI data from your mach …

weather_for.pl is a simple commandline tool to get the weather for your town or city. It uses the OpenWeatherMap API to fetch the weather. You give it a city name and an optional longitude/latitide pair (to he …

A lot of video people are hosting on Vimeo these days, it seems well featured reliable and fast, and it doen’t have quite the same psychotically disordered commenting culture as has developed at youtube. However, though there is good stuff to watch on there, not every video uploaded has …

This is a thing that I’ve wanted to do for ages, and it came up for me during this week'd episode of Hak5, which I am getting to be a big fan of by the way. The material under discussion was what to do when one of your known hosts changes. Darren was saying he was a bit slack and just did a …

One of the roles that I have at work is maintaining the Magento software that runs our ethical gift shop. I recently upgraded one of our Magento installs from 1.5.0.1 to 1.5.1 using the newly introduced mage commandline tool. As regular readers will know I am a bit of a CLI freak, and was happily …